Inventory and Price Watch: It’s Harder To Get Started

America’s starter-home shortage is worsening. The number of available homes for the average first-time homebuyer saw its steepest year-over-year drop in three years, 12.1%. And buyers have to pay more to get them: 1.9% more of their income, an increasingly unaffordable pace.

We took a look back at affordability since 2012 and compared annual change until 2015 to declines in affordability in the last year and found some markets have drastically slowed their pace of unaffordability, while in others, declines in affordability of starter homes continue to plague first time home buyers.